The Sims 4 returns to the series' roots

James 'DexX' Dominguez

One of the fundamental aspects of The Sims 4 is a "sense of really caring for your Sim".

Trying to explain how The Sims 4 will be different from previous games in the long-running series, executive producer Rachel Franklin cites how we humans relate to those little artificial people.

“We really went back to the roots of The Sims, about creating and controlling people, and what that really meant,” she recalls. “One of the fundamentals was the player/Sim relationship, and that sense of really caring for your Sim.”

Her mouth twists into a wicked smile. “Of course, that doesn't mean that you're not going to torture them,” she says with a laugh, “but it means you have a connection. You care.”

“When we looked at fulfilling that promise in The Sims 4, we realised that we had to make the Sims even more robust. We had to give them bigger personalities.”

The Sims was one of those rare titles that appealed to people who had never played a computer game before. Rather than shooting aliens or blasting through a warzone, the simple pleasure of controlling the lives of a small number of artificial people - people with family, jobs, and hobbies - was appealing to a wide range of players.

It has been five years since The Sims 3 launched, shifting 10 million copies in the process, and the gaming public now has more powerful PCs and more sophisticated tastes.

For the first time in the series, each Sim in the game will have a complex personality, variable mood, and multi-layered relationships with those around them.

“This is the first time that a Sim’s personality has influenced the gameplay so dramatically,” Franklin says. “The traits and the life goals you pick really feed into the gameplay in a really dramatic way.”

“Even something that seems just kind of fun, like a walking style, can be really meaningful, because the second you pick that walking style, you make a connection. You jump to a conclusion, like a first impression, right?”

Franklin wrinkles her nose and gestures at an imaginary person. “You'll think, oh, that's a snooty Sim, or why is she so perky? You get a feeling, and that's what this is about: invoking a feeling for your Sim, and we try to do that as early as possible and keep it going as long as possible.”

Rather than being two-dimensional beings, Sims will have a number of traits and life goals that evolve as they progress and age, all of which interact to make a complex digital human.

“I can decide that I want to make an outgoing Sim who is a neat freak but hates children,” Franklin says. “What is that Sim going to be like, I wonder?”

“People are multi-dimensional, right? So you've got a goal, and the traits, plus the aspiration comes with a bonus trait. So now you've got four traits right off the bat, you've got this lifetime aspiration, you've got this physical characteristic, you've got what they look like, which is always intriguing, and then you have influences from the environment.”

Franklin also promises that Sims will have believable moods that will shape their behaviour; you won’t see someone breaking up with a partner and then cracking jokes, for example.

“We need to keep you immersed, we need it to make sense and keep that continuity for you,” she says. “Different emotional states have different interactions available. So I'm sad, so I can create a sad painting, but I can't necessarily turn around and ‘woohoo’ [The Sims’ PG-friendly equivalent of sex].”

“If a girlfriend and boyfriend get into a fight, they're not going to turn around and woohoo; they're not robots. It's going to continue, and it's going to change the course of that conversation and what they do next, and there's this beautiful thread running through it.”

“I play really close-up now. I zoom right in, because the facial expressions and the nuances of the animation, the amount of care we've put in to make it really feel alive and rich, I find that I want to see what's going to happen.”